These People Know that ISIS Isn't the Only Immediate Threat

PHILADELPHIA–There seems to be some discomfort over on the right that the Democratic Party got through the first night of its convention without mongering sufficient fear. Noted hypnosis subject Mike Pence seemed particularly exercised. Per ABC:

"It is extraordinary to think that yesterday in Philadelphia 61 speakers came to the podium and not one of the named ISIS by name," Pence told the national veterans' group in Charlotte, North Carolina. "This man will name our enemies without apology and he will defeat them," Pence added, pointing to his running mate Donald Trump, who stood behind him at the podium.

However, and of course, there was a similar phenomenon at work in Cleveland last week. There is no more immediate and existential a threat to the planet than the climate crisis. Glaciers are cracking. Deserts are expanding. And, god knows, the weather is speaking loudly for itself here this week. Still, the Republicans adopt a platform that is the climatic equivalent of inviting the leadership of Daesh to the White House Easter Egg Roll, as Mother Jones reported. Here are just a few of the highlights:

Abolish the EPA as we know it. The platform calls for turning the EPA into "an independent bipartisan commission" and shifting responsibility for environmental regulation to the states. This would remove the federal government's ability to study the effects of pollution and establish safe standards. In a particularly Orwellian touch, the Republicans promise that a kneecapped EPA would adhere to "structural safeguards against politicized science." That actually means safeguards against scientific findings they don't like. In other words, they would politicize the science.

Stop environmental regulatory agencies from settling lawsuits out of court. Huh? Republicans have been pushing this for a while. Here's what it's about: When an agency doesn't do its job of enforcing a law like the Clean Air Act—often the case, especially under Republican administrations—environmental groups sue to force it to. If the agency thinks it will lose, it may then reach a settlement and agree to do its job going forward. That's what the platform aims to prevent. Fighting in court until every last appeal is dead can make cases drag on for years, and Republicans want to get away with not regulating polluters for as long as possible.

Forbid the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide. This one pretty much speaks for itself. It would wipe out the agency's ability to reduce emissions and slow climate change.

One day, when we're all fighting for elbow room on a rapidly disintegrating cinder, we can discuss this further. However, instead of thinking about that, and instead of praying to Gaia to turn He, Trump altogether into a ferret, how's about we meet three people who make sense, not merely on addressing this impending catastrophe, but also on how to organize politically to do something about it? On Tuesday, a climate and environmental caucus met for the first time to map out strategies they can use both within and without the political process.

The first person who made sense was a guy named Cecil Corbin-Mark, who is the director of policy initiatives for a group called We Act For Environmental Justice in New York. Corbin-Mark argues that one of the problems the environmental movement has is that it tends to argue scientific minutiae instead of the obvious real-world effects of the crisis. He also draws a clear, bright line from the climate back through every element of the daily lives of the people whom his organization serves. As he said:

In the environmental justice movement, we have worked over the years to engage people in fighting for good climate policies and to protect their communities, not by throwing at them a science book when we know that our schools are failing them in many ways in teaching them science, and confusing them with a lot of scientific gobbledegook. What we do is we try to connect the challenge of the climate crisis to their own very real problems. The fact that power plants not only emit carbon, but they also emit co-pollutants that are very much the triggers of asthma attacks and other kinds of respiratory illnesses, and that while we're dealing with the reduction of carbon, that we have to deal with those things as well. We try to connect it to the fact that the heat waves they're experiencing are things that are only going to increase because of the destablilizing factors that are part of the ongoing climate crisis, and that if they're paying more in their electrical builds, either because they have to buy an air-conditioner, or because they have to run more fans to cool themselves, indeed this is a problem they need to be working on, too.

In addressing the caucus, Corbin-Mark made no bones about the size of the job. "Start small," he told the group. "Organize locally. And then, when you have that support, take the fight national. Congress isn't going to take you seriously at the start because Congress doesn't really work for you."

The second person who made sense was Jane Fleming Kleeb, the state Democratic chairman from Nebraska and the person who organized the local opposition there that helped shut down the Keystone XL pipeline, the continent-spanning death funnel and current conservative fetish object. She told the caucus:

We didn't beat it with a bunch of suits lobbying Congress. We beat it with frontline communities and when unlikely alliances came together. It was farmers and ranchers. It was private communities. It was moms. It was climate advocates. And we all stuck together, not letting any groups or any lobbyists put a wedge between us. I think that lesson was a real chance for us to take on not only other pipelines, but other forms of the fossil fuel infrastructure. I think that this climate caucus, if we're able to form it, will send a message to the Democratic Party that we're serious–that this is not some fly-by-night operation. That climate has to be woven into the party at its very core. I took that seriously and put my hat in for chairman of the Nebraska Democratic party. And we beat them. We beat them by a pretty good chunk, and we only did that because the Bernie Sanders folks followed the process. They came into the party and became part of the party. So I've always lived one foot in the movement and one foot in the establishment. We have to do that. As Bernie folks, as Hillary folks, if we care about climate, we have got to reform the party from the outside as well as from the inside.

(Note to those people seeking to shoot very big fish in very small barrels–Kleeb got unanimous applause for that last part. Nobody booed. No drum circles broke out.)

The last person who made sense was a woman named Sheila Holt-Orsted, a former bodybuilder and a two-time breast cancer survivor. In 2007, a researcher named Dr. Robert Bullard, who is regarded as the father of the environmental justice movement, discovered that Holt-Orsted's home county of Dixon, Tennessee was a public-health time bomb. Cancer rates had skyrocketed. Birth defects plagued both families and their pets. Sheila moved back home from Virginia to take care of her family. Holt-Orsted's father and mother both died of cancer, Sheila herself was diagnosed, and so were several of her cousins. For decades, industrial plants in and around Nashville had been dumping toxic waste–specifically, TCE–into a leaky landfill that had poisoned the community's water supply. Working on her own hook, Holt-Orsted meticulously collected the evidence of what had happened, including letters in which local white families were warned off the local water while local black families were told it was fine to drink. She testified to the Senate. She got the national and international press to pay attention. Eventually, in 2011, Holt-Orsted and her family won the largest settlement of an environmental justice suit to date. She told the crowd:

They told us that as long as I was living, no one would settle. They told me I had to die first, because I was the one who had brought the national attention. The Ku Klux Klan came out of the woodwork. They told us if we brought Al Sharpton to a rally we were planning that somebody would be hung. Around 2008, Hillary Clinton, not only did she call for the first environmental justice hearing in the Senate ever, she asked me to testify, because I left my house behind and I told my husband, "Look. I'm not looking for another man. I'm going to find justice. I'm going down there to Ground Zero." I moved back and did everything I could. I knew I was fighting giants, but because Hillary called the hearing, I came back to the D.C. area, and I said, "Oh, even though I'm feeling great, walking OK, I'm going to go by and see my doctor." I found out that my breast cancer had returned, so I say, she does great things even when she doesn't do great things.

Nobody booed. Nobody put duct tape across their mouths. The people who made sense were not a story. But, to be fair, nobody dealt out the old boogedy-boogedy about ISIS, either. What's wrong with these people? Don't they understand television at all?

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